Breaking Normal
by Amanda Lord
Summary: Its just a normal night in Italy until Andrew opens his mouth. The Powers give Buffy the hard choices, but sometimes that makes choices easier. PostChosen, smack dab at the end of Angel.


Because nothing is how it should be, because we think we know what is to come, but we have no idea.

Andrew is not a friend to secrets. It isn't that he is one to blab the hidden truth, but he simply blabs on and on and on and like the whole monkeys and typewriters thing, eventually the things better left unsaid comes out. I've learned to tune him out these days because Andrew is so annoying it hurts, but buried in sci-fi critiques and over analyzation is occasionally a golden nugget.

I don't hold my breath for them and usually they don't sink in for a day, seeing as they're buried under so much babble. Andrew equals migraine, nuff said.

I always thought that he was a necessary evil, something that I had to keep around lest I set it out on the world. I never really considered that Andrew had the power to change my life.

Normal day.

I'm looking over files, once I was action girl, now I'm research girl. No more action, just the intense boredom of files.

He's conferencing with Xander via videophone.

The topic of discussion for the boys currently is, as it always turns into with Xander, the missing eye. I'm so bored with that conversation, but he's always searching. I guess I would be too, but if Willow can't do anything who can. Well we met this guy, but he kind of would have to take a soul. Xander was tempted, but Willow and I put on resolve face. There would be no loss of soul in return for a missing eye in the New Watcher's Council.

Xander pouted for days.

"So there are these guys in LA, they can reattach limbs and stuff," Andrew tells him, "Its like in Empire, when Luke's hand comes off. I mean if they can give Spike two new arms, then they can definitely give you an eye."

I look up and ask when Spike got his arms taken off, but the thought stopped when I saw Andrew's body language.

Andrew suddenly was standing very stiffly. His body language shows that he knew he had done something wrong.

That is when it happened. That is the moment that changed the course of my life.

Just like that the world stopped and I kept going. Just like in those horrible slapstick black and whites. The car hits the wall, but the body keeps going forward. Thrown free of the wreck only to land on harsh hard ground.

Xander seemed to hold his breath and Andrew didn't move a muscle. They both just wanted me not to have heard that.

"Andrew," I said with enough threat to scare the boy, we had been living in close quarters for long enough that he knew THE TONE.

He looked at me for a second and winced. He knew what was coming.

Andrew is pretty easy to intimidate. I glared at him for a nanosecond. God help us if anyone ever wants to know anything about the Council, they'll tickle Andrew and he'll sing.

Just like he started talking.

"In LA, he's in LA. With Angel, he was a ghost, we're not sure how that happened, he just appeared one day, and now he's corporal, he tried once before, but instead he saved Fred's a girl, isn't that funny, not funny ha-ha, but funny funny, then one day poof he's alive, well not alive, but he could touch things, including things that he shouldn't have, and he's working for Angel, well not really working, they won't give him an office, but he hangs out with them and he's all…"

"Andrew," I say with the threat implied and he shut up. I got up and I went out.

Strangely enough the re-emergence of the second vampire who loved me didn't spark any emotion, even numbness. Even more odd was the fact that the first vampire who loved me was harboring him didn't do anything to me either. I wish I could say that it was because I had so been there and done that, but that wasn't it.

I simply couldn't believe it.

It was a strange two hours. I sat in the park and tried to remember how to think.

I had started to feel something good happening in my life and I didn't know what exactly, but it didn't suck. I spent the weeks thinking hey I'm normal now. I've got a boyfriend, who isn't quite normal, but what we have is. I'm not slaying. I'm raising my sister. I'm going to school, true its Italy, but hey this is as normal as it gets.

I like how life always seems to prove me wrong.

Things I seem to believe never really pan out.

People don't come back from the dead or the deader. Sure I did, sure all of my exes and my exes exes seem to find their way from the afterlife, but I'm normal now. I'm completely over the whole dying and coming back thing.

I don't want to deal with this, and I hate that I'm feeling like this again. I get scared and I run and I don't want to be like that any more.

I'm normal now.

But I'm running again.

I walk out into the strange world that wasn't California, which is the only place I had been until I destroyed my town. I walk out into the world where I wasn't the savior, where I was just one girl of many sent out to save the world. I wasn't the chosen any longer. I wasn't distinct; I was simply one of the masses.

And that is what I thought that I wanted. This is what I thought would work best for me. I thought that this was right.

I wish that I could say that this normal life thing was working out, but it was hard. In the back of my head I am beginning to think that I wasn't made for it, I always wondered but I never got the chance to actually experience that thing people call normal. I mean I have been fighting for so long it is hard to stop.

The peacefully glassy calm was to pristine, I saw the storm clouds coming and I wanted the wind to kick up. I wanted action.

With the arrival of him I felt changed. This little bit of information, the knowledge that he's back, interacting with people, and no one thought to tell me, I feel as if the entire world is keeping secrets from me, even more I feel as if the entire world is lying to me.

They're lying that it is even possible for me to have a normal life.

Because people stay dead, even selfless heroes.

That is what happens in this normal world.

I wanted the fight. I itched to fight. Something that had lay dormant in me for all these months was clawing at me. Before coming here, before trying normal in Italy I had fought every night for eight years. Every night I would stalk the inhuman and fight them. I thought I could shut it off.

And as much as I want to put that part of me on the shelf I can't. It isn't who I am.

Spike was right, it is part of me.

A thought which makes me really really really mad. He has no right to be right, he should be dead in the not animated way.

Spike was in LA and neither of my vampire ex-lovers were speaking up. Angel was working for an evil law firm, Spike was dead and kicking, and I was living a normal life.

I hate everything. Self-righteous Buffy had reared her domineering head and I hate them all.

I hate Andrew for thinking for one second that he could keep a secret from me. I housed him; I protected him, even though he killed a human. Cardinal rule in the Buffy-verse, you don't kill humans and since I was angry I will choose to forget the glaring wrongness of Willow, Faith, Angel, and Spike.

Andrew was employed because I allowed…

That thought process was a little too high and mighty, even for me. Andrew's life had nothing to do with me. He just was in a place and things happened around him. Because he didn't know that he didn't know Andrew was now a very powerful man. Firstly his brother taught him demon summoning, then he got caught up with the wrong crowd, although how you meet the wrong crowd at a Star Trek convention is beyond me. Then the hapless Andrew ran across the border on fugitive status, returned, killed his best friend, was held prisoner by a bunch of teenaged girls, and then he became their chef, before becoming their leader.

Of sorts.

Andrew was not good or evil or any of the above. He is a boy who just happens to not have died. Why did fate save him over Anya? Why is he the only supervillian left? What is so goddamned special that he has made it this far? Sunnydale High kills off more of its students than the streets of DC, what is so special about Andrew that he is really making something important of his life?

He never asked for his life, yet he embraces it. I hate that I got this bum end of the deal with all that fate and prophecy. I really hate that he's never done anything right in his life and he's got everything and he enjoys this. There are no Andrew related prophesies, but the world needs him all the same. He's fine with his role in the world and I have always struggled. I have fought to stay alive every night and he just skips into greatness.

God I hate him.

He doesn't want it, he doesn't shun it, but he has it. He isn't good because he just doesn't seem to notice those things, but he isn't evil because he's too hapless.

I hate him for being too stupid to know that he should be ashamed of his actions or proud of his accomplishments.

He's just too stupid.

I hate Angel. Angel, who always left, always kept his secrets. He never could tell me anything. He never told me that he was a vampire until that suddenly "just came up." He didn't tell me about Drusilla until I saw them kiss. He always felt that he could just show up and disappear at his leisure.

Don't think I don't partially blame him for dying that first time. If he weren't such a coward then the master may not have killed me. No, Angel couldn't go down and face his family I'm getting lured into hell and he's reading Baudelaire, true if things had been different Xander wouldn't have been there to save me, but that doesn't matter, I'm too busy hating Angel.

Angel and his damned secrets and his closet jealousy that he pretends is nothing. He leaves and then I get a lecture about my choice in men. Yeah he gets to say that Riley is bad, but he's screwing Darla.

Angel beats me to death in the self-righteous hypocrite department.

Quiet secrets like the son I'm not supposed to know or remember that he has. I'm an ocean away and I can still feel his shame at failing. He fails at one thing and one thing only and he hates himself for it. He isn't a man. He can walk along side us, but he isn't one of us.

The things that a man does he tries and he fails. He tried romantic love and he can't do physical intimacy of a relationship, and that is an understatement on an apocalyptic scale. He can't do fatherhood, somewhere he feels like he is the world's biggest failure because he couldn't be a father. He tries to be a friend to that little gang and he buckles under the weakness of his own creature.

He fails over and over as he holds his secrets to his chest.

But I won't feel sorry for him. He has allowed himself to take on a little bit of evil in the form of a law firm to save his son's soul. His soul for his son.

I hate him for distancing himself from me because he couldn't get close to me. I hate him for distancing himself further now because he joined the side of evil. I don't trust him now and somehow I don't think that I'm going to get my Angel back intact. He's been cracked for a while, but now I think that he is really gone.

I hate him.

Then there is Spike who I hate more than the other two. Oh keep this secret from me will he. He will keep something like he's back from me. He'll stalk me and do all kinds of obsessive things, but when I finally tell him that I love him he brushes it off and "forgets" to call me when he comes back from the deaderness.

Damn I hate him.

I think that I have and will always hate him. I hated the way he smirked and walked into my life, like I was there for just for his joy of hunting, like those little foxes on the English countryside. I hate that he watched from the shadows and then impatiently waltzed in trying to kick my ass. He was always was watching me or fighting me. He stepped into my life and he became omnipresent and trying to kill me, then gone, then omnipresent with the ruiniation of my Angel friendship, then gone, then omnipresent with a chip, then gone, then omnipresent with a soul, then gone. Gone I thought for good.

I hate that I began to depend on him way back in high school, when the bottom had just fell out of my world, an evil Angel, friends who were in the hospital, and I was hunted by the cops for killing the one girl in the world who could lift my burden.

Of course it was Spike who was there talking about puppies and the world still existing.

I hate that even then he even gave a thought to the world.

I hate that he knew me, that one little appearance after a long absence would resound that I will never just be friends with Angel. He nailed home truths I was too stubborn to face.

I hate that I had to help him when he was neutered, and more than anything I hate that he fell in love with me.

I hate that he expected me to downshift that quickly. I hate that he expected me to fall for him as soon as he fell for me.

The impatience and the ego on that creature. He is the most exasperating and annoying creature. He always insisted on telling me with what I didn't want to hear.

He comforted me when my mother died, he swore to protect my sister against a god, and he gave me a reason to live when I couldn't find one.

I hate him.

My fists find the creatures. I don't have a stake, I've tried to stay away from them, but it doesn't matter, with fists alone I show them that I am THE SLAYER. Because I am you know I always will be. I was ready to let that part of me die. The last Slayer laid to rest to let the slayers, with the little s, go on. However there is something that I overlooked.

I am the Slayer.

I am.

Like the ocean it doesn't stop, waves constantly in motion

And I kill every vampire that thinks that they should be in the world, because there are two that I can't touch.

I hate them.

I was covered in dust when my cell phone rang.

Damned phone.

Damned Giles who went from not understanding the concept of a non-rotary phone to suddenly investing the new Council money in a state of the art system that allowed all of us to keep in contact, even if contact is from the desert of Africa.

Damned Xander.

"Don't want to hear it."

"I get one sentence."

I thought about the years of friendship, I thought about the one person who had never left me, never faltered in being by my side. He deserved one sentence. I didn't say anything and Xander spoke quickly.

"You told Angel you weren't ready and to wait for you and you told Spike you loved him only hours later, if you went right now how would you choose, but moreover what would you choose."

And now I hated Xander. Goofy turned overly opinionated Xander. Xander who always thought that because he saved my life that time he had any right to influence my life. Xander, always loyal to me firstly.

I hated him because he introduced logic.

"Learning sentences from Andrew," I grumbled.

"Buffster, think. With Angel you thought of nothing but forever, with Spike you could barely stand yesterday. Maybe he doesn't want to know. Maybe he doesn't want to have the door slammed in his face. Maybe he doesn't want to find out your choice."

I don't know if I would or not though. I don't know what I would do.

"How would you choose Xander," I asked quietly, "I don't care that you don't like either of them, but how would you choose. How would you choose between the soul mate who keeps putting distance between you and the arch enemy who would do anything for you."

"You've always been blind when it comes to them," Xander said lightly, "Think this through."

"Everything from getting a soul to killing his ex, "I kept on, I couldn't stop, the flood gates of insecurity were open and I couldn't seem to shut my mouth. It isn't pretty and it wasn't fun all of the time, but he was always there when I needed him.

"You have a life, stop with the exes, Buff."

I agreed, and for a moment I thought I could do it. For a moment I thought I could let them go. Maybe I would never be normal, but may be I could live with out them.

Then something happened I blinked and behind my eyes something flashed.

You know it is kind of funny. Now that there is no pesky potential phase and the girls are always slayers the slayer dreams don't happen. Not one of them has the dreams. Faith has them. Maybe the dreams will pass on, or maybe they will end. Who knows, but I'm not going to die to find out.

I had never gotten a slayer dream while awake, but this was a mighty important portent. All I knew was that I had to get to LA with some muscle.

NOW.

I saw very clearly the end of the world.

"Xander," I said slowly and evenly, "Get every girl you can to LA now. Every girl is to be at Angel's Hotel in as soon as possible."

It was the voice. I was general Buffy again; Self-righteous Buffy was put away. This was beyond important. This was dire.

"I don't know if that is even possible."

I thought of all the threats that I could make. I thought of all the commands that I could bark. Then I realized that I only had to say one thing.

"You'll get your eye back," I told him.

"I'll see you in LA."

"I'll see you at the end of the world."

"Again."

"For real this time."

I hung up. I knew that everyone would be there. Dawn would come if I was bringing the girls. I wanted to keep people safe, but I couldn't. I needed everyone for this one. If they were with me I could keep them safe.

People were going to die.

I hate Angel. I hate Spike.

They were going to piss off some very important people. I had just seen the result. My battered and bruised vampires at the end of the alleyway, some of his people injured, some his people dead, some of his people run away, some of his people now apparently blue.

I walked down the street. Thinking it through. Dawn, Andrew and I all had to get on a plane now.

On the plane Dawn and Andrew were calling everyone. Faith and Robin were coming from Cleveland; Giles was bringing the hoard from the school in England. Everyone they could think of was networking. Xander wouldn't be there for the first round, but he was bringing the reserves.

It scared me to think that perhaps I would need them.

I scared me to think of the death that was imminent.

Instead of focusing on how screwed the world was by Spike and Angel, who I hate. I played the little game of how I was going to kill myself two vampires of the Aurelius line.

And this time they would to stay dead.

I was halfway across the ocean when I realized I had forgotten my boyfriend. It was a momentary thought in passing. I'd save the world and then worry about my love life. I'm trying something new here.

I was halfway over the United States when I realized the answer to Xander's question. I knew. I knew whom I was rushing in to save.

I love Angel, but Angel, the one I knew is gone. The creature that came with hope had died when he lost the soul. Angel had come back from soulessness, but without the hope that he could be better. I was in love with the romantic hero, but that guy was gone, in his place was a tragic hero, a super hero, but never again someone I could be with. The person he is had nothing to do with me. He wore the same face, but wasn't the same.

I hated Spike, but the one I knew is gone. The creature who came with destruction had died long before he had the soul. Spike had come back to Sunnydale, but constricted as to what he could hurt. I hated the arch villain, but that guy was gone, in his place was the annoying antihero, but never again someone that I could truly hate. The person he is had everything to do with me. He wore the same face, but wasn't the same.

When I arrived in LA I was ready.

Somewhere in the fear that I wasn't ready for this battle came the certainty that I was ready to live life. I was baked.

Just as long as we lived through this I would be okay.

Hey both of us had died twice, so even death wasn't the end.

Dawn, Andrew and I walked into the Hyperion, Faith was readying the troops. Then the air became electric. Angel had done it this time. Giles and Andrew had come up with quite a plan. Slayers flowed into the streets of LA. I had a special job.

"I've always wanted to fight a dragon."

I had to smile, say what you want about our personal life, but Angel always did like to have the biggest challenge in a fight.

"You might need this," I told him throwing a huge flamethrower in front of him.

They all turned to look at me. I nodded to the girls behind me to take the bleeding man. They would go back to the hotel where hopefully we had medical staff waiting. Girls filed into the alleyway.

Angel looked unsure at my presence.

But I forced myself to look at Spike.

His eyes held that spark, almost as if he knew that I would be there.

"But that'll ruin all the fun," he drawled.

Around us there were a multitudes of creatures that I had never seen before, but in the protective circle of the slayers he smirked.

"You'll have plenty of fun," I said, barely able to contain my smile. I couldn't remember the last time I smiled, "I brought you weapons."

I tossed him a broad sword.

"Makes me feel all manly." He said brandishing it.

"Ready for this?" I asked him. He looked at me and the swagger was gone for a moment. He looked at me with that openness.

He was still to far away to touch me, but I was getting goosebumps anyways.

"Don't die, I get to kill you," I told him.

"I wouldn't have it any other way," he told me, "I'll see you at the end of this."

"Geeze," Angel mumbled and turned to fight.

The masses were upon us this time.

"Yeah we have a few things to discuss."

"Like what? Me being here?"

I would have shot him a glare if it hadn't been for the fact that I was attempting to decapitate a demon that looked somewhat similar to a rhinoceros.

"Trying to maim here," Angel grumbled.

"Spike," I yelled.

He looked at me and it was suddenly still, not really, but in my mind everything stopped, like on the stairs in the Glory days.

"I meant it."

He grinned from ear to ear.

"I know."


End file.
